No Mission Is Impossible (17 page)

              
“The great significance of Operation Sabena was strengthening the principle that when there is a military option, we execute! Operation Sabena was a groundbreaking operation from the standpoint of resisting hijackings and fighting terror without compromise. Since then, the terrorists' methods have changed, and with them the painful price of hits by suicide bombers, missiles and more. But terror won't stop unless we fight it, and the danger won't disappear if we don't address it.”

The IDF code of ethics states that no Israeli soldier can ever be left behind enemy lines and abandoned, be it on the battlefield or in captivity.

O
n June 21, 1972, Sayeret Matkal embarked on Operation Crate 3, whose objective was the abduction of senior Syrian Army officers from Lebanese territory, in order to trade them for three Israeli pilots held captive over the previous two years in Syria.

“The Crate operations were born after we submitted several crazy plans to the General Staff about how it might be possible to free the pilots, and all were rejected,” recounted General (Res.) Uzi Dayan, the operation's deputy commander and later the head of Sayeret Matkal. “One day, I got angry and went to the defense minister and told him, ‘Maybe you're too old to understand this, but the captives are our friends. We're hoping that if the situation were reversed, they would also be doing everything to free us.'”

The defense minister was Moshe Dayan, Uzi Dayan's uncle. Chief of Staff David Elazar was also troubled by the plight of the pilots—Gideon Magen, Pinchas Nachmani and Boaz Eitan—who had undergone severe torture in Syrian prisons. The chief of staff had been looking for a way to speed up negotiations over the prisoner exchange
and ordered the submission of operational proposals for the abduction of Syrian officers. The Sayeret's idea had fallen on receptive ears and would also be approved by Prime Minister Golda Meir.

The thinking was that, in exchange for such a valuable bargaining chip, senior members of the Syrian intelligence establishment would agree to free the Israeli pilots, as well as influence their Egyptian allies to release ten captives jailed in Egypt.

Operation Crate 1 got under way after several observation missions conducted by Sayeret commanders from the Mount Dov sector, next to the Lebanese border. The location selected as suitable for the abduction was a dirt road in Lebanon, ascending the mountain from the north, at a point where vehicles had to slow down. The Sayeret commandos penetrated into Lebanon in the dead of night and reached the target area. The mountain slopes were covered with dense vegetation. The Sayeret set an ambush with Ehud Barak serving as commander of the raid team and Benyamin Netanyahu as head of the blocking team. They lay in wait for hours, but the Syrians never came, and the mission was called off.

A second attempted abduction, Operation Crate 2, was scheduled for June 19 in the Rosh Hanikra sector, in upper Galilee. This time, the ambush was set on a different route within Lebanese territory. Again, Barak commanded the operation and Netanyahu headed the blocking team. Both of Bibi Netanyahu's brothers, Yoni and Iddo, also took part in the mission. “This was the only operation that Bibi, Yoni and I all participated in together,” said Iddo Netanyahu. “Actually, we did something which was not allowed in the IDF.” Indeed, the IDF did not allow several brothers to participate in the same mission for fear that they could be all killed or wounded.

The role of the blocking team was to prevent reinforcements from reaching the zone of action and to trap anyone attempting to flee the encounter with Barak's unit. As they lay in wait, a Lebanese shepherd appeared and spotted the border fence barbwire that had been flattened down by one of the teams. He and his flock nearly stumbled onto the hiding men; Bibi Netanyahu radioed Barak, and he instructed his men to capture the shepherd immediately. The commandos grabbed him and
laid him down next to them. The shepherd was scared to death, certain he was going to die. “To shut him up, I told him,
‘Uskut!'
- ‘Shut up!' in Arabic—and signaled with my hand that we would slit his throat if he didn't keep quiet,” Iddo Netanyahu said. The shepherd got the message.

But then a new issue arose: a Lebanese armored car armed with a cannon, as well as an additional vehicle, were following the officers' convoy at a distance of roughly 1.25 miles. The two vehicles positioned themselves next to Bibi Netanyahu's concealed detail, and the convoy continued toward the mountain ridge. Netanyahu whispered the news into his radio, informing Barak, who instructed him to keep hiding. Barak reported to General Motta Gur, now commander of the Northern District, and to the chief of staff, who instructed him to halt the operation immediately and withdraw back to Israel.

Barak tried to argue, attempting to persuade the senior command that it would be possible to carry out the assignment without risk, but the response was total refusal. A disappointed Bibi Netanyahu instructed his men to prepare to go. This was his last mission before his discharge from the army, and he had so much wanted it to succeed.

“In the end, the convoy passed mere meters from us,” Uzi Dayan said, “and we looked at them longingly.” Later they found out that among the Syrian and Lebanese senior officers in the convoy was no other than the chief of staff of the Lebanese Army.

When the Israeli troops returned to the assembly area next to kibbutz Hanita, the debate continued. “Why did you stop us?” Barak asked the chief of staff and the senior officers who were with him. “We were so close to them, we could have carried out the assignment without any trouble. They were in our hands, and we let them go.”

Elazar tried to calm him down. “I didn't want to endanger the troops at the ambush—the Lebanese armored car would have discovered them.”

Barak countered, “You're forcing us not to tell the truth. If I had known that the mission would be called off, I wouldn't have reported the Lebanese vehicle to you. You could have trusted my opinion. I'm telling you that we could have carried out the assignment successfully. In the future, I'm not going to tell you about any armored cars!”

Two days later, on June 21, authorization was given for Operation Crate 3. Bibi Netanyahu had already been a civilian for twenty-four hours; Yoni Netanyahu was appointed the operation commander, and Uzi Dayan, his deputy.

This time, to avoid yet another aborted mission and retreat, Barak decided to stay at the forward command post, together with General Gur and his later successor, Yitzhak Hofi, so that the operation would be completed.

The group this time was much larger. The Sayeret Matkal force was accompanied by a covering team of paratroopers, an armored unit and members of the Egoz commando unit. In addition, tanks and anti-tank cannons were allocated to provide cover as well. It appeared that nobody wanted to take any chances this time.

“In the lead-up to the mission,” Iddo Netanyahu recounted, “we trained a lot for the abduction under Yoni's command—how to grab them, how to pull someone out of a moving vehicle and more. Yoni decided to demonstrate how to do it and chose one of the team members, the poor guy! During the demo, Yoni sprinted unexpectedly at the soldier, who was sitting in a vehicle, grabbed his hair and pulled him out. The guy was thrown from the vehicle onto the ground, and the maneuver was deemed a success—except that the boy was still suffering from scalp pain days later.”

At daybreak, the forces breached the border fence and penetrated into Lebanon. Yoni Netanyahu went forth and checked that the path leading to the road was clear of mines. At 11:00
A.M
., the Syrian officers' convoy came into view, accompanied by two armored cars and two Land Rovers. The convoy moved in the direction of the village of Rameish and stopped less than a mile to the north.

At 11:25, the Sayeret commandos left their hideout in two vehicles, approaching the breach and stopping next to it. The soldiers pretended to fix a broken-down vehicle; meanwhile, the Syrian convoy started to move forward.

At noon, the convoy passed the village of Ramia. Yoni Netanyahu received the order to enter the ambush site on the road. Uzi Dayan's team
took up positions by the vehicle, and the rest of the unit spread out along the road in the direction from which the Syrian officers would arrive.

Then something unexpected happened: some Lebanese villagers had seen the Israelis. They stopped a Volkswagen that was driving ahead of the convoy, warning the driver of the Israeli soldiers waiting in the area. The surprised driver continued a few feet, quickly turned around and started fleeing eastward. The soldiers lying ready at the front of the ambush position, awaiting the convoy, saw the Volkswagen turning around, swiftly getting away. One of the commandos ran to Netanyahu and reported what he had seen, just as Netanyahu was receiving word from the command post that the convoy was also starting to turn and head back.

“We realized that they were starting to turn around,” Dayan said. “We immediately started running toward them. Yoni's jeep also got there, half a minute later. Initially, they didn't really understand what was happening—they might have thought we were a different Lebanese unit. I shouted at them in Arabic, ‘Stop! Halt! Hands up!'”

This was the critical moment: who would pull the trigger first? Dayan fired warning shots at the feet of the Syrians and Lebanese. They were in shock but, after a moment, opened fire as well. The exchange was short but left four Lebanese escort troops dead, among them an officer. A Syrian officer and an Israeli commando were wounded.

Amid the tumult, two officers, one Syrian and one Lebanese, fled north and vanished into the vegetation. The rest of the officers were captured: an intelligence officer at the rank of brigadier general; two armored corps colonels, who served in the operations wing of the Syrian Army; and two pilots with the rank of lieutenant colonel who belonged to the Syrian Air Force intelligence. The Syrian officer who managed to escape was the head of Syrian field intelligence.

The teams of Yoni Netanyahu, Dayan and Muki Betzer conducted wide sweeps in search of the escaped Syrian and Lebanese, but without success. In addition to the officers, a green Mercedes had also gotten away. The blocking team to the east was alerted by radio and gave chase to the Mercedes. The car was later found abandoned, riddled with bullets,
next to Ramia. It turned out that the Volkswagen and the Mercedes had happened upon the combat zone by chance, without any connection to the officers' convoy.

The battle scene, minutes after the shooting was over.

(Courtesy of Aviram Halevi & “Israel Defense”)

The mission concluded shortly before 1:00
P.M
. The soldiers, who had spent just ninety-three minutes in Lebanon, returned to Israel in euphoria. Dayan later remembered, “On the way back to Israel, we already heard the newscast on the radio that there had been an operation in Lebanon. I was driving back in a Chevrolet Impala, and I remember that we worried about filling the holes that the bullets had left in the Land Rovers and the Impala, the latter of which stayed in the service of the intelligence wing for years to come.”

The next morning, the Jordanian newspaper
Al Ra'i
commented, “This was the greatest victory for Israeli intelligence in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel landed a heavy intelligence blow to the Syrian Army.”

Following the abduction, Syria demanded that Israel return its officers without conditions because they weren't prisoners of war. A year later, the two sides agreed to an exchange of captives, and on June 3, 1973, the three members of the air crew returned to Israel. In return, Israel released the abducted officers, as well as forty-one additional Syrian and Lebanese captives. Israel agreed to grant clemency to Kamal Kanji, a Druze leader from Majdal Shams, in the northern Golan Heights, who the previous month had been sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for spying for Syria.

   
UZI DAYAN, LATER THE DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF

          
“I personally knew the captive pilots, whom we wanted to free following the abduction of the Syrian officers. “Pini” Nachmani had grown up on the moshava of Yokneam, and his mother knew mine. He had also trained in the air force academy with my cousin. He had been a leading navigator in the Sikorsky helicopters of the 114 Squadron, and had participated in many of the operations that his unit had carried out. Through him, I knew Gideon Magen, a Phantom squadron commander, who had also fallen captive.

              
“When the pilots were released, we met them at the Ramat David airbase, and Nachmani's first words were ‘I knew you'd eventually get us out.' It turned out that he had been updated by his wife, Rochaleh, who had written him a letter that had reached him via the Red Cross, and in it she had told him, ‘We went fishing in the Kfar Baruch lake and came back with five particularly fat fish.' Nachmani, who knew his wife didn't like fishing, asked the Red Cross representative about operations conducted recently, and he brought him a newspaper clipping about the operation. . . .”

              
“The greatness of this mission was in our devotion to the task, that we didn't give up. We went back three times before the operation succeeded. Its uniqueness was that it wasn't a mission to bring back intelligence or to strike the enemy—it was intended to save our pilots jailed in a Syrian prison.”